wing ta

Two years ago my husband and I bought a house. It’s a gob-smacking piece of 1902 architecture with ornate woodwork, the likes of which I’d never seen before. It was built by T.P. Healy, who made a name for himself in Minneapolis building homes for the flour barons and other folks making it big in the milling town. Our house was once a grand gesture of a time of wheat prosperity, but it fell on hard times, as did the country, when the depression hit and it eventually became a boarding house and then apartments. Luckily for us and for the preservation of history, the house was kept in pretty good condition, considering the number of people who ended up owning it and living there. By the time we bought the house it was broken up into 4 apartments, which was honestly part of the appeal. Not that we intended to rent the apartments out, in fact, it is only zoned as a duplex, so two of them were illegal. The draw was the 4 kitchens that came with all those apartments. I had visions of having a “family” kitchen and then using one of the others as a studio to work in. For the first several months that is exactly what I did. At first it was awesome, I cooked meals on the first floor where I had a great gas range, ran up to the second floor, which had the best oven in the house to bake and then to the third floor kitchen to photograph, because the light is AWESOME up there. This was all good fun, then I realized that I was doing about 12 trips up and down the stairs per recipe. Quite a workout plan, but not exactly efficient for my work day. None of the apartment kitchens really fit the bill, but as a combined effort they were proving less effective than I’d fantasized. This became abundantly clear while a team of 6 people tried to shoot the photos for The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. We all jogged up and down, which I’d come to think as normal, but they moaned as they baked on one floor and shot on another. The photo shoot also took days longer than expected as a result. The next week I had an architect, Gregg Hackett, drawing up plans for one kitchen that would satisfy all the needs. A few months later Blue construction moved in and built it.

We were really lucky to have the original blueprints (above) from 1902 to work from and we tried to put the kitchen back to where it had been originally. This meant taking out a bedroom and bathroom to make space. The pictures below are a before and after of that renovation.

The finished kitchen is featured this month in both Fine Cooking Magazine’s Behind the Kitchen Door and Mpls/St Paul Magazine’s Home Tour. First I spent a wonderful day shooting with Chuck Miller from Fine Cooking and my neighbor, friend, fellow food blogger and cookbook author, Stephanie Meyer, who helped style my kitchen. The editors at the magazine were particularly taken with my cake stand collection and are doing a GIVEAWAY of a pair of cake stands, just click here to enter. Then the team from MSP magazine came by and we had an absolute blast tossing pizzas and flour around the kitchen with my boys. It is incredible to see the space through the talented lenses of these folks. To see all their photos check out the articles, the photos below are just my snap shots.

Welcome to Zoë Bakes

I'm Zoë François and I love to bake. This is where I play with sugar and take the mystery out of baking everything from cookies to wedding cakes. I studied pastry at the CIA, worked in restaurants, write cookbooks and now you can also find my creations on the Cooking Channel, Fine Cooking Magazine, General Mills, Cooking Club Magazine and Breadin5.com. More...